Category: Marketing Strategy

I just finished up another meeting with a client. They engaged me to document their messaging and create a marketing plan for a new product. This product is very different than the products and solutions they have been offering; it’s in a different market, it has a totally different sales cycle, and it has competition. The frustration I have is they don’t want to do any marketing – they are going to continue with their sales strategy to get that first sale. Once they get that first sale, then maybe marketing. Collaborating with a colleague, we came up with this quote and I truly believe it. If you don’t spend …

March 21, 2017 Last week was a busy week for the U.S. White House. One of the items they accomplished was releasing their Budget Blueprint. Any time the White House releases budget guidance, our clients in HPC get a little nervous. Budget guidance from the White House typically affects academic researchers as well as various governmental agencies. Commercial vendors wonder how the news will affect spending by their customers and prospects. I spent a lot of time learning about the Budget Blueprint. Full disclosure: I didn’t read the entire budget. I read multiple articles written by people who are experienced in reading these types of documents and summarizing their …

Event Marketing Part 2: Vendor Booth Tips There isn’t an exact blueprint to successful exhibiting; however, attracting potential customers isn’t as hard as you may think. For first time vendors or as a refresher for those who exhibit regularly, we have documented our thoughts and experience on vendor booth tips that specifically cover what to prepare one month prior to your event. Following these tips will help ensure that your booth is a busy hub of activity! Your Booth: What’s Inside The Basics: Carpet, Tablecloth, Furniture and Electricity Check with the event promoter on the following items: Will the event be in a conference center and already carpeted, or do …

COMING SOON! LinkedIn’s New Company Page Template Keeping up with social media innovations can be about as challenging as keeping up with … a pair of labrador retrievers. Doesn’t it seem that, just when you have your company’s social media profiles looking top-notch, the game changes? I’m sure we’re all for improvements that keep social media moving upward, but wouldn’t it be nice to get a heads up on the changes that are coming down the pipeline and to be offered some useful tips on how to prepare for those upcoming changes? Well, that’s what I’m here to talk to you about in today’s blog. Less than 2 weeks ago, …

Are you ready for winter? How the bears are preparing and how you should, too. This photo and the YouTube video were taken from a safe distance (inside the house). The bears have been in my yard (one of them is shown above)… and the fox, moose, and deer. Oh, and there are birds and squirrels. How do I know? The squirrels are high up in the Pine trees chewing off pine cones – thump, thump they fall to the ground. Then, they grab the pine cones and stash them in the corner of my garden. The dogs’ noses are on high alert. They go out in the yard with their noses to …

Social Media Marketing for B2B Companies… Yes, your company really can benefit Tweeting, pinning, posting, and sharing – these were not marketing terms 10 years ago. In the whirlwind of social media, how can anyone keep up with best practices? Let’s start with your personal life. Maybe in your downtime you follow friends on Facebook to stay in touch, or perhaps you enjoy skimming Pinterest posts for inspiration. Although Facebook continues to lead the pack in popularity for our personal lives, does the same apply in the business world? It’s important to note that the same social media marketing efforts that are successful for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) might not be as …

Event Marketing Part 1: Checklist for your upcoming event SC16 is right around the corner. Can you believe it’s just 7 weeks away?! Our HPC, Enterprise Technical Computing, Research, University, and Organization customers have us quite busy with their event marketing and preparing for SC16. This spring, we shared our Musing (Blog) about how to market your company for an upcoming event, Don’t Just Show Up – Engage!. To help get you ready for your industry’s next big event, we would like to highlight some bite-size pointers in a four-part, #JustStartToday series to cover what to do 2 months prior to an event, 1 month prior, during the event, and …

Tips on Execution of Better Email Campaigns Emails! We all get so many of them! They are a part of our lives. So much so that, for many of us, the first thing we do in the morning is scroll through our inboxes looking for the emails that we want to read. As I scroll through my inbox, I’m looking at who the emails are from and the subject line. Then, I scan the first couple of sentences in the email to quickly make a decision on how much time I should spend on it in its entirety. Is it an email requiring action on my part? Is it an …

September, Labor Day, and Branding: What does this all mean? What does Labor Day mean to you? To me – besides the obvious shoutout to American workers for their contributions and achievements – it means the end of summer and that snow is just around the corner. People are back from vacation – it’s back to work for adults and back to school for kids. It’s also the kickoff to what I (lovingly) call Supercomputing season: the lead up to the annual SC conference. From a personal and visual perspective, it’s the changing of the Aspen leaves and watching the Rocky Mountains put on their snowcaps. Soon, the snow will …

The Times, They Are A-Changin’ In this special blog post, Kim and Brian Whitaker from ZB Content teamed. Enjoy! Coming off ISC16 and preparing for SC16, those of us in HPC take stock of our industry. After the rush to release something meaningful at ISC, it’s time to take a breath and measure the progress everyone around us has made in the past year – since SC15, leading up to ISC16, and onto SC16. The industry is always changing, but this year, it seems like the rate of change has accelerated. HPC is going beyond traditional workloads, use cases, and even technologies. HPC in the cloud is a real thing. …